EVERYONE deserves a day off sometimes, eh teachers?

This week’s one-day teacher strike certainly put the cat amongst the pigeons in our house.
DD1, who is in Year 6, was most outraged that her class had to go in as usual because her teacher isn’t in the NUT.
Yet her best mate in the same year got the day off because her teacher was in the union.
I know it would have caused us nothing but hassle with child care if she had been off. But still, I didn’t half feel bad for DD1.
Okay, she’s only been back a matter of days following what seems like the longest Easter break in the history of Christianity.
But I believe every child is entitled to experience the untold joy of.... the unexpected day off school.
I’m old enough to remember a time when kids got at least three unexpected days off every winter because it was snowing so badly. It was brilliant.
At Christ the King in Arnold, they were particularly careful about not letting us in when it snowed, because they knew that all the hard lads (and lasses actually) from Arnold Hill would be waiting outside the school to ambush us with killer snowballs.
And then there was that other regular unexpected day off we could always look forward to in the old days - the school boiler blowing up.
The message would usually have to go out via an announcement on Radio Trent.
Oh, the dancing round the kitchen when we realised what Dale Winton or whoever it was that presented the Breakfast Show in those days had just said.
Boilers never really break down as much these days though do they?
As for teacher strikes, I remember one time in the early 1980s when there was industrial action every week for months.
It’s a wonder I can even manage to read and write the amount of unexpected days off I had.
So spare a thought for kids like DD1 , who never get to skive in quite the same way as we used to.
And next time there’s a strike, let’s hope she gets unexpectedly lucky...